Wozniak: Original Macintosh Was a ‘Lousy Computer’

Steve Wozniak, one of the original co-founders of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), recently made an appearance at the “Further with Ford” technology conference in Dearborn, Michigan. As always, Wozniak was happy to give his uncensored opinion on events in Apple’s history that he had a privileged insider’s perspective on.

Regarding the first Macintosh computer that Steve Jobs helped to create, Wozniak stated via The Verge that, “what [Jobs] did was he made a really weak, lousy computer, to tell you truth, in the Macintosh, and still at a fairly high price. He made it by cutting the RAM down, by forcing you to swap disks here and there. It was a lousy product.”

Wozniak noted that Jobs approached the Macintosh project as an opportunity to “compete with the Lisa group that had kicked him out.” Wozniak recalled that Jobs called the Lisa group “idiots” for not keeping the price of their computer down. However, Wozniak notes that, “one megabyte of RAM back then cost 10,000 of today’s dollars,” so a computer with any significant amount of RAM was bound to be fairly expensive.